Former Student Gets 14 Years In Shootings

HAMPTON — Former Hampton University student Odane Greg Maye wanted to kill himself, but wasn't sure he could bring himself to do it.

So he concocted a plan: He would go back to his old campus, which he had left several months earlier, and begin shooting people.

FOR THE RECORD - Published correction ran Thursday, November 12, 2009.A story in Wednesday's News section incorrectly reported the name of the man sentenced Tuesday in an April shooting at Hampton University as Greg Odane Maye. His name is Odane Greg Maye. The story also incorrectly listed his age as 19. He is 18. (Text corrected.)

That would leave him with "no choice," he told a psychiatrist later, but to follow through on killing himself, too.

Maye's rationale for the shooting - in which he shot a pizza delivery driver, a night dormitory watchman and himself at about 1 a.m. on a Sunday morning in April - was revealed publicly for the first time during Maye's sentencing hearing Tuesday. The motive came out in a mental health report referred to in court by Hampton Commonwealth's Attorney Linda D. Curtis.

Maye and the two victims have all pretty much recovered from their wounds - at least physically - and attended the hearing.

Maye, 18, entered a conditional guilty plea in August to six felony counts against him: two charges of malicious wounding, two counts of using a gun in a felony; burglary; and shooting in an occupied building. The plea was conditional in that Public Defender James Gochenour plans to appeal on the basis that Maye's mental illness caused the crime.

At the end of Tuesday's hearing, Circuit Court Judge Christopher W. Hutton gave Maye 14 years to serve on the six charges, with another 53 years suspended. He also ordered Maye to pay more than $62,000 in restitution, mostly to compensate his victims for lost wages. Hutton said the fears that such a shooting sets off on college campus are "intense and long lasting." And the most direct victims - the two men shot - have likely been "changed for the rest of their lives," he said. From reading the health evaluation, though, Hutton agreed Maye was suffering from mental illnesses - including depression, personality disorder and schizophrenia - that helped spur the shooting.

"He had been suffering from a brain that was bending, ill nearly to the point of breaking, causing him to ... go to Hampton University to commit this evil."

Curtis acknowledged that Maye had a good upbringing, got good grades, participated in track during high school, and had no prior criminal record. The shooting also wasn't done "for the joy of it," she said.

On the other hand, Curtis said, the "shock and anguish" of Maye's crime "rippled out" far and wide, "to the families and parents (of HU students) who turned on CNN that morning" and saw the news - followed by their rising fears if they couldn't reach their children immediately.

And though Maye was mentally ill, Curtis said, "he was in control and he made these decisions."

Gochenour said Maye was "a perfect son" before "his diseased mind concocted this plan." He urged an eight year sentence - the mandatory minimum - asking Hutton to give Maye "some light at the end of the tunnel."

Last fall, in Maye's freshman year at HU, an English instructor noticed something Maye wrote in an essay that "stage 2 of life is overrated," and referred to "ending it all."

That led to the discovery that Maye spent a month holed up in his dorm room without going to class. He was committed to a hospital for five days, then left school and moved in with his mother in New York. He later moved to Richmond with his father, where he found three guns he toted to campus.

At 1 a.m. on April 26, in the lobby of Harkness Hall, Maye fired twice at the pizza delivery man, the first shot hitting him in the neck and the second shot hitting his hand and chest. Then he shot the dorm's night watchman in the arm and thigh. Maye acknowledged later that he would have shot others if they were there.